On Good Relations
by L.M.Lewis
Summary: Mark gets along with everybody.


Disclaimer: These are not my characters and I make no profit from them.

Thanks, Owl!

**Author's Note: **In the course of three seasons, we meet five of Hardcastle's kin (his sister-in-law, two aunts, a niece, and his brother), four of whom seem genuinely fond of Mark and one who's actually _dated_ him—and all of them seem to be on less than fully cordial terms with Hardcastle himself. Does he ever wonder about this? Has he even _noticed_?

This is set shortly after the third season episode, "Brother, Can You Spare a Crime?" and before the return (and partial rehabilitation) of Sonny Daye in "McCormick's Bar and Grill".

**On Good Relations**

by L.M. Lewis

_I can't help detesting my relations. _

_I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand _

_other people having the same faults as ourselves_

--Oscar Wilde

00000

"So your brother took off, huh?" Frank surveyed the quiet vista from poolside at the estate, tipping his glass of tea and letting the ice settle.

"Hmm," Hardcastle said, not looking up from the file Frank had handed over just a few minutes earlier. The question must have eventually filtered all the way through, though, because a moment later he glanced up and added, "Yeah, this morning. Good thing, too. I think he was starting to corrupt McCormick—if you can picture that."

Frank gave that a little thought and finally let it be.

"Anyway," Milt added impatiently, "the kid was talking about driving him to the airport—would've been an hour, one way. And I think he was figuring I'd go along for the ride. Like we hadn't already had a whole week to talk." He shook his head and let out a long sigh. "I dunno, Frank . . ."

Exactly what it was he didn't know was left hanging. It looked as if he intended to get back into the file.

Frank, who'd only met Milt's brother Gerry a few days earlier, and that to get a formal statement from him regarding his kidnapping and subsequent events—a statement that had somehow not been all that formal—said idly, "Seems like a nice enough guy. A little irresponsible maybe."

Milt's glance shot up from the page he was studying and locked onto his. A sharp, "Hmmph," was followed by an even sharper, "that's the problem with guys like him. 'Nice', huh? And then they stir up a big mess without even a warning for other folks to duck."

Frank tried to keep his expression understanding and smooth things over a little. "Anyway, Mark said he thought Gerry had learned his lesson this time, a close call and all that."

"There's a sucker born every minute," Milt muttered.

"_Mark_?"

Hardcastle frowned at his own off-handed assessment. "Okay, well, not exactly that, but he's got a soft spot for family."

"I've never heard him say anything good about that dad of his; I think he even called him a lounge lizard one time." That actually hadn't been the strongest term Frank had heard Mark use.

Milt gave him another impatient glance. "Not _his_ family—mine." The impatience gave way after a brief moment to a more puzzled expression, as though the man had only just now realized something himself.

This was followed, a moment after that, by a muttered, "It's kinda weird when you think of it." Obviously he hadn't, at least not prior to then or in any aggregate way. "Even Warren."

"Your niece?" Frank said, one eyebrow up. He'd met Warren. She'd had a subpoena served on him once.

"Yeah, he even went out on a date with her one time—that was a coupla years ago."

Frank felt the other eyebrow join the first. True, this was Warren, but Milt letting his sister's kid date a parolee—at least a couple of years back, when he'd been mostly just that.

"You let—"

"Yeah," Milt interjected glumly. "I shoulda warned him, but it happened kind of fast. He mistook her for one of the catering staff at a fund-raising shindig here." He shook his head. "I didn't know they'd hitched up and hauled out until he came home the next morning."

Frank thought the eyebrows might be stuck.

"Bogart festival at the drive-in." Milt shook his head slowly. "You ever heard Warren on Bogey? When McCormick finally crawled in he looked a little shell-shocked."

Of course this was several years after the fact, Frank supposed, but those facts included Mark not getting bounced back into prison post-haste for being out after curfew with a close female relation of a very tough judge. He was still digesting this when he heard his friend starting up again.

"Didi likes him, too," Milt mused. "I never really got that. He's messy. He puts ketchup on _everything_."

"That's your sister-in-law, the one who made you crazy with alphabetizing the freezer? The one who got Ira Tratter busted?"

Milt frowned. "_I _got Tratter busted—me and McCormick, anyway. Ran him down in a speed-boat."

"The way Mark told it, your sister-in-law was onto him—she'd been following him for weeks."

"It was an _accident_, for cripes sake. She was doing it for a class project. She made Tratter nervous, that's all. Heck, she makes _me_ nervous, and I'm not even doing anything wrong."

Frank shrugged lightly. "So, Mark likes her. No big deal."

"Yeah, he does." Milt's frown became a little grimmer. "And my aunts, they're crazy about him."

"I _know_ he likes them," Frank grinned. "He says he'd even drive a Studebaker for a plateful of their peanut butter cookies."

"He was more than just their get-away driver," Milt grumped. "He let them talk him into searching that writer's house." He shook his head. "Not my fault that time. He _knew_ what those two could get up to."

Frank might have been giving his friend a speculative look. He might have been caught doing so by the man he was looking at.

"What?" Milt said testily.

"I guess I never gave it much thought before," Frank said. "They're all kind of like you. Can't just be hereditary," he added innocently. "I mean, there's your sister-in-law. Ya s'pose it's catching?"

Receiving no immediate answer to this beyond an indignant stare, he ventured another idle speculation, "But I guess it might—"

This time Milt cut him off with another, sharper, "_What_?"

"Just thought it might explain why he likes 'em, that's all," Frank shrugged again and—in for a penny, in for a pound—added the corollary, "maybe why they like him, too."

The series of expressions on his friend's face as he worked through the implications were an education on how not to play poker.

"Nah," Milt finally said, having apparently settled on flat-out unadorned denial as his best bet, "this is McCormick we're talking about here. He just gets along with everybody."


End file.
